“Most importantly, have fun.” -Alex

Really. I almost didn’t want to write this out of fear of revisiting what had haunted me for a straight week after I watched it. It didn’t help that I had just gotten out of high school at the time and saw a lot of things that looked familiar.

Elephant starts by following a number of teenagers throughout one school day. John (John Robinson) is an average kid with long blond hair and an alcoholic father. Elias (Elias McConnell) compulsively takes photographs. Kristen (Kristen Hicks) is an awkward outsider. Benny (Bennie Dixon) is a quiet, muscular African-American guy in a mostly white school. Nathan (Nathan Tyson) is a cute jock who’s worried his girlfriend might be pregnant.

But even my descriptions of these characters suggest that they are “characters.” They’re not. They don’t have specific goals or motivations; they don’t have plot arcs with separate acts. As you’ve no doubt noticed, they’re all played by unknowns who use their real names. They simply appear, disappear, and maybe talk to random people. Van Sant follows them in long tracking shots or in wide shots, and sometimes just lets the camera remain still while a number of characters pass.

The effect is twofold: one, it sets a very deliberate pace that we in the audience quickly adapt to. And two, it allows Van Sant to avoid telling us what to think. By keeping his camera distant or motionless through most of the scenes, we don’t get any perceived messages or hints at how we’re supposed to respond to a scene: there’s no reaction shot to signal what somebody’s thinking, no close-up to highlight an important line, no insert to alert us to a prop that will be used later. We accept that we are in the middle of a day at an ordinary suburban high school.

It becomes increasingly clear that two of the teenagers, Alex and Eric (Alex Frost and Eric Deulen) are planning to shoot up the school. A girl asks Alex what he’s writing in his diary. “My plan,” he responds.

The movie throws us half-baked “explanations” almost as a way of mocking the very idea of an explanation. One of them plays a violent video game in one scene. They order the guns off the internet. They share what appears to be a spontaneous kiss. One even tells one of the faculty members that they should have listened to him more. It rings hollow.

The school shooting happens. Some of the kids we’ve met die. Some escape. The shooters don’t have specific targets; they’re not only going after the jocks or the popular kids. They shoot anybody. One of the teens walks by the shooters as they’re walking into the school, wearing body armor, carrying the weapons. They tell him to get out of there. Why spare him? Were they just waiting until they got inside? No answers.

The violence is almost physically painful in its lack of sensationalism. Bullets hit people with muted, sick jolts. There’s not an excess of blood, nor an attempt to hide any. It’s not anything like a video game, and it makes violence in mainstream horror movies look like immature sick jokes by comparison. Elephant has already made us accept the victims as real, ordinary people, and we already know what the movie’s about, so their deaths don’t come as cathartic moments or even as shocks. They’re just sickening, confusing, and sad.

The movie was released four years after the shooting at Columbine. It’s now been ten years, and while a number of the popular media myths about the real-life Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have been exposed — they weren’t part of the Trench Coat Mafia, they weren’t targeting jocks, they weren’t gay — there has never been much in the way of an explanation. They wanted to be famous, I guess, or maybe that was a side benefit.

In Dave Cullen’s recent book Columbine, he suggests that while Klebold was depressed and following Harris’s lead, Harris was simply a psychopath: someone who, for no reason, was incapable of feeling empathy and was capable of killing people. The movie actually seems to follow this narrative, as in the closing scenes we find that one of the shooters is more in control of the situation, more aware of exactly what he is doing, than the other.

But what do we make of that? Van Sant crafts a movie that brilliantly invokes a normal day of high school, and then shatters it with an equally brilliant portrayal of incomprehensible evil — and refuses to provide any conclusions about it. He just wants us to watch — to notice, for once, the elephant in the room.

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On Nov. 21, 2008, the Harris and Klebold parents were sent the same letter requesting cooperation. “Your stories have yet to be fully told, and I view your help as an issue of historical significance,” it said. “In 10 years, there have been no major, mainstream books on Columbine. This will be the first, and it may be the only one.” The letter came not from Mr. Cullen but from Jeff Kass, whose Columbine: A True Crime Story, published by the small Ghost Road Press, preceded Columbine by a couple of weeks.

“Mr. Kass, whose tough account is made even sadder by the demise of The Rocky Mountain News in which his Columbine coverage appeared, has also delivered an intensive Columbine overview. Some of the issues he raises and information he digs up go unnoticed by Mr. Cullen.” –Janet Maslin, New York Times

“A decade after the most dramatic school massacre in American history, Jeff Kass applies his considerable reporting talents to exploring the mystery of how two teens could have planned and carried out such gruesome acts without their own family and best friends knowing about it. Actually, there were important clues, but they were missed or downgraded both by those who knew the boys best and by public officials who came in contact with them. An engrossing and cautionary tale for everyone who cares about how to prevent kids from going bad.” ——-Ted Gest, President, Criminal Justice Journalists